American Made Movie cites some chilling statistics: Since 2001, 57,000 factories closed in the U.S. with a loss of 5.1 million manufacturing jobs. And if accurate, these are only the surface numbers hinting at the domino effect of factory closures on surrounding communities. The myopic ‘90s techno-utopians imagined that IT would furnish the jobs in the “post-industrial age.” New technologies have provided employment for some, but the efficiency of high tech comes with costs to the labor market. And “post-industrial” remains an illusion. Somebody is making most of the things we use somewhere. They’re just not being made in America any more.
Writer Ryan C. Wilson and directors Nathaniel Thomas McGill and Vincent Vittorio explores the fall of Detroit as a worst-case model for American decline. In the 20th century, the city wasn’t just rolling cars from the assembly lines, but was an industrial eco-system with foundries, rubber plants, glass forgers and machine shops supporting the auto industry. Nowadays much of the city suggests Rome in the Dark Ages, a half-inhabited place of ruins.
American Made Movie is a call to think about where the objects of everyday life come from—and what that means to us. In professional baseball, America’s pastime, the uniforms, balls and gloves, not to mention the souvenirs sold in stadiums, are made in China and elsewhere. There are rays of hope, including the ambitious efforts of localities such as Gwinnett County, Georgia, in luring foreign businesses to set up shop in a country abandoned by its own corporate elites.
